Natural Selection By Beer Glass

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Today, I found out that one of the owners of a restaurant I worked at many years ago passed away. I do not yet know what caused his untimely demise at the too-young age of  52. I do know that he was a great guy, and loved by many. After signing the online obituary guestbook, I realized I had an interesting story to tell you guys. Actually, I could tell you dozens of stories about my time at this surreal restaurant, but today I choose to relate the story of the Glass Eater.

The year was 1980. I was 17, and needed a job. A friend of mine who worked at this restaurant, Ramad's (name changed to protect the guilty), put in a word for me and I was hired as a dishwasher. Up to that point I had been employed in only one other job - a nine-month stint at an ice cream parlor in a small but very ritzy shopping plaza. That cushy experience, replete with rich, preppy, teeny-bopper co-workers, piped-in Muzak and upscale clientele, did not prepare me in the least for the wild parallel universe that was Ramad's Restaurant.

Geographically, Ramad's was less than a mile away from that ice cream parlor. Philosophically, they were light-years apart. Ramad's was a restaurant with a reputation - that the food was decent, the owners were partiers who looked the other way when shenanigans were going on, and the bar was a riot. Literally.

I went from working at a snooty ice cream parlor to working at a place where Hell's Angels were regulars. At times, they would ride their Harleys right into the bar and park them there. All kinds of people went there - the aforementioned bikers, blue-collar factory types, college kids, and ordinary business folks. There were fights, but the management kept things remarkably calm, all things considered. The place was simultaneously a fun place to party and an ominous, dark place where you just knew all kinds of illegal things were going on. It was fun, but more than a bit of a nerve-wracking place for a twitchy and naive kid like me to be working.

One night, I was serving as barback. For those of you who have never had the pleasure, a "barback" keeps the bar supplied with beer, ice, empties the trash, etc. Basically, the barback is the bartender's personal slave. Well, that night was fair-to-middlin' busy, nothing special. The only annoyance was a couple of mildly irritating drunks at the west end of the bar. They were loud, but they were behaving - just loudly rambling with each other. One was fairly short and stout (I'll call him Bob), and the other was a big tall guy (I'll call him Ted). At one point, Ted leaned to his buddy, showed him his empty beer glass, and drunkenly said "I bet you five bucks I can eat this bar glass." Bob said "You're on!".

I was a bit sheltered as a child, pretty wet behind the ears so to speak, and as such was totally unprepared for what happened next.

I watched from behind the bar, about five feet away. Ted stood up from his barstool, picked up the empty glass (the glass was the same style you see in the image above) and started chewing it up and swallowing it. I watched in horrified fascination as he, over the course of two or three minutes that to me seemed like an hour, actually ate the damned thing.

Halfway through, blood started dripping out of his mouth as glass cut into his tongue and inner cheeks. Cuts accumulated on his lips as well. That stupid drunk bastard didn't care though - he was on a five-dollar mission, and nothing was going to stop him from attaining his financial goals, by God. The bartender pleaded for him to stop, to no avail; so he and I just stood there and watched it all unfold with pie-plate eyes.

Ted finished eating the bar glass and set its thick base on the bar. He said through blood-frothed lips to Bob, "Pay up!" Bob, though, was having none of it. He pointed to the inch-thick base of the glass and said "You didn't finish it! You have to eat the whole thing like you said!" Talk about surreal. One drunk lunatic eats shards of glass and is bleeding profusely from the mouth; the other drunk lunatic, without the slightest regard for his friend's well-being,  is telling him that the business transaction was not yet complete.

Well, as you can imagine, Ted did not take Bob's refusal to pay up very well. Words were exchanged, louder words were exchanged, fingers were jabbed in chests, and the inevitable fight was on.

Ted, being the taller of the two idiots, was out-reaching and out-punching Bob. Bob seemed to be losing the fight, but Ted was starting to have his own problems. The bleeding, already bad, was getting much worse due to the exertions and contortions inherent in any fistfight. His entire face, along with the front of his shirt and jeans, were covered with blood. He started staggering around while he was throwing punches.

Perhaps sensing an opportunity, Bob moved in. Almost a foot shorter than Ted, he started punching Ted upwards, directly in the neck. That's when all hell broke loose. Multiple shards of jagged glass started spearing out of Ted's neck. Suddenly, blood was jetting out from his neck and mouth all over the place. Blood was everywhere - on me, the bartender, the bar, the floor, the booths behind them, the customers around them, and the glass-fronted jukebox - which was about 15 feet away. The other customers were screaming like they were on a plane that was going down. Amazingly, Ted gamely kept fighting for maybe 30 more seconds. Then, he keeled over onto the slate tile floor, groaned loudly, and bled out.

The bartender had called the cops and paramedics the moment the fight broke out, but despite the fact the paramedics arrived within minutes, Ted was already dead. Bob was led away in handcuffs, and he eventually went off to prison.

That monumental imbecile Ted died because of a drunken five dollar bet. If that isn't the definition of "senseless death", I don't know what is. I was in total shock, unsurprisingly. I had witnessed something most people will never see, something so awful that if I had been the only witness, no one would have believed my story. I really can't properly communicate to you how it felt to me, a meek and sheltered teenaged boy at the time, to see someone die right in front of me, especially in such a stupid, brutal and insanely gory manner.

So, Gentle Readers, the moral of the story is: don't make foolish bar bets when you've been drinking heavily.

Oh yeah, and don't eat giant shards of glass. Almost forgot that one.

Just one more thing - if you must witness something like that, be sure you're not barbacking that night. I was the totally freaked-out, still-shaking kid who had to clean up all that blood.